by Mcgee, Alan
Dick Green also really came into his own while I was pulling myself back together. He’d quit his job as a pensions clerk in 1987 and joined the crew signing on to the Enterprise Allowance Scheme in the office in London. I only worked from the office half-time – the rest I was doing from Brighton or wherever I happened to be. Jeff Barrett was there in the office too, doing press for us, for the House of Love. He hated the House of Love’s music but he was doing a good job on the press. It was a good atmosphere in the office then. Ed Ball would be there too, sort of answering the phone, helping do the PR, getting what needed to be done done. We all pitched in with everything – there wasn’t such a thing as a job title, unless we were taking the piss. I called myself ‘The President of Pop’ if anyone ever asked.
The House of Love just kept getting better and better live. Bickers was really challenging Chadwick by now for star of the show. We scheduled the album for the start of May and I really believed that we could make it work.
But when it came out it was disappointing yet again. Middling sales in the first week and the tour to go alongside it didn’t sell out.
What made the difference was a John Peel review in the Observer. He’d never really supported our bands before but started playing the House of Love every night on his show. ‘Destroy the Heart’ came out in June and the album started to sell really well.
In Brighton I’d begun to cheer up. I’d moved in with Bobby Gillespie’s brother Graham, and we began to run riot. We took all the drugs we could get hold of and went after every woman we could find. For the first time since I’d started Creation there was no hindrance to me living the life of the bands.
Bobby and his girlfriend Karen Parker arrived in town then, shortly followed by Andrew Innes and Robert ‘Throb’ Young. Jim Beattie stayed in Glasgow and that was the end of Primal Scream for him. That was sad – we’d all grown up together – though him leaving might have been best for the band’s musical progression. If you have a twelve-string Rickenbacker player, you have to use him, and your songs are going to be defined by that sound. Now you had Throb and Andy armed with Les Pauls, and the music changed direction, became more raucous, straight-out rock and roll, influenced by the Stooges, by MC5, New York Dolls. It was totally unfashionable dirty rock music. I didn’t know what they were hoping to achieve and it was clear to me the new direction was really unfashionable. Having said that, they were a better band live. Innes could really play and he was rocking the whole band. They went from being a fey indie band to rocking like animals. It was great fun. Innes was the real energy, and Bobby was getting off on it. There was no point me trying to step in and guide them at that point. They were finding themselves. My philosophy with Primal Scream was always to let them do what they wanted to do and see where they ended up.
I’ve always been grateful to Primal Scream for being such great friends in those Brighton days. I had been so sad and they picked me up, made me see that life could be fun again. They made me remember why I’d founded Creation in the first place. I wanted to make them famous.
Three months after the House of Love’s self-titled album came out we were selling a thousand copies a week. I was trying not to think about the inevitable but it happened in July 1988: Guy Chadwick turned round and said, ‘We’re leaving.’ I knew Guy’s ambition was too big for him to be happy with Creation now he was big enough to interest the majors. They were already beginning to circle. I didn’t do contracts so there was nothing stopping my bands from leaving Creation.
At the time I was fatalistic: ‘Big surprise – every other fucker’s left me, Jesus and Mary Chain, Yvonne – why shouldn’t you?’
But then Chadwick asked me to be the band’s manager and I cheered up (much as I’d rather have kept them on my label). They’d asked other people to manage them, I found out later, but Chadwick’s ambition had frightened them. The other candidates had thought that the size of the advance he was seeking was unrealistic and that, even if someone would give it to him, it would put too much pressure on the band.
I was as ambitious as he was. I’d helped them secure a good publishing deal for their songs that June, playing one of the interested parties off against another and getting a much better deal than they’d first offered. To be a good negotiator I think you need courage and cunning. You can’t be scared they’re going to take the money off the table, whatever they say. Don’t worry about the ones who threaten you.
Because I’d done so well for them, even when I wasn’t taking a cut, Chadwick must have wondered how good a negotiator I’d be if it was also my money I stood to gain. They decided I was the ideal man to broker a deal to the majors for them, and unlike the other potential managers they’d spoken to, I was extremely ambitious about the money they could get. The more the better! We wanted the world. Chadwick and I were beginning to be a dangerous team.
The House of Love had restored my sense of purpose. Creation’s reputation was on the up again. We were having fun with the marketing then, playing on my public persona. We did a special 99p offer for ‘Christine’ by the House of Love and ‘Hollow Hearts’ by the Weather Prophets with an advert in the NME: ‘our president still loves the kids’.
I was back on top form, out all the time, a prominent figure even if I still wasn’t doing interviews. We made lifesize cardboard cut-outs of me and sent them round the record stores before organizing a one-day festival in August, ‘Doing it for the Kids’ at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town. We put out ‘Destroy the Heart’ by House of Love to coincide and put them on as headliners. I even considered flying around the stage on wires – thank god I thought better of that.
Primal Scream played in the middle of the line-up. They’d lost a lot of their jangly indie fans with the change of direction – it was a real transition period for them. Just below House of Love we put on a band we had signed recently called My Bloody Valentine.
I had first seen My Bloody Valentine in 1987. Joe Foster had recommended them to me after a label called Lazy put out a single. I went to see them at a gig Jeff Barrett had put on and they were absolutely rubbish. They really wanted to be on Creation, Joe told me, but there was no way I was having any of it.
At the start of 1988, they’d offered Biff Bang Pow! a gig supporting them in Kent. Supporting them? I thought. Supporting them? They’re fucking anoraks. They’re like a bad Pastels. A bad Pastels; can you be a bad Pastels? Anyway, fine, I said, but we’re headlining.
That was a mistake. Kevin Shields magnanimously said, okay, we’ll go on first. And they went on and they absolutely destroyed the place. They were playing out of their skins. Dick and I were watching them and turned to each other. The power was so amazing. It was so raw. The feedback hadn’t emerged yet, and they sounded like a psychedelic Motörhead (and in fact none of their albums sound like they sounded that night). We were shocked at how good they were. So when we went on to headline Biff Bang Pow! sounded distinctly underpowered in comparison. Quite embarrassing. As soon as we got offstage we offered them a deal and they accepted.
That night at our Town and Country showcase My Bloody Valentine were incendiary, the best band on, but it was House of Love who headlined and they didn’t let themselves down at all. Professional as ever. Anthem after anthem. Terry a guitar hero, Chadwick a great singer and front man. We had found some stars who everyone in the industry now agreed could be massive. Well, such is life. Now it was time to sell them to another label.
I decided I would conduct the auction for House of Love in style and checked into a suite in the Waldorf with my new girlfriend Belinda. I meant business, I wasn’t some naive indie chancer – I was there to discuss money, and I wanted to discuss a lot of money.
Belinda was a mate of James Williamson, a friend of mine and Bobby’s who lived in Brighton. James is an entirely diabolical human being but we had great fun with him at the time. Belinda was incredibly beautiful, and James was really into her, so I was very pleased when I realized it was me she was interested in.
&
nbsp; I didn’t normally stay at such a posh hotel but I didn’t let on when the record labels came to visit. We were having the time of our lives, doing coke and speed, drinking champagne.
They nearly all came to see us: EMI, Phonogram, Columbia, Siren, MCA . . . Graham Carpenter, who I’d worked with at Warners on the Primal Scream album, and had now gone to Polydor, was interested. No sign of Rob Dickins or Malcolm Dunbar though.
I was asking for £80,000 to start off with. That got rid of MCA. The other four kept talking. Guy Chadwick and I wanted a firm two-album deal, to make sure that if the first didn’t work for whatever reason there was a second chance.
I was there in my suite with my beautiful girlfriend while the major labels came and told me what great taste I had. It helped me put my time at Warners in perspective. The money would go up £50,000 every week. We were talking about £200,000 in the last week.
After three weeks we checked out of the Waldorf. I’d done my job there. The auction was feverish. Graham Carpenter drove down to Brighton to see me, tried to get me to promise it to him, for old times’ sakes. Well, I’ll do my best, I said.
But I’d been very impressed with Dave Bates at Phonogram and his Fontana label. He was a real music fan, and an unashamed capitalist too. He’d signed some awful shit – Def Leppard, Tears for Fears – but he’d also signed Pere Ubu and Julian Cope. He made enough money with the awful shit to give him the power to sign whoever else he wanted. He was a maverick – he didn’t toe the corporate line, said exactly what he meant, no matter how rude it was. I suppose I saw him as an example of how I could be successful without giving up on who I was. He was one of the few people I met at the majors who you could speak to like a human being. And when I said I wanted House of Love to be as big as U2 he understood exactly where I was coming from, that I didn’t care about indie values at all, whatever they are. I wanted House of Love to be massive, sell millions of records and make us all loads of money.
He offered £400,000 plus the costs of recording. Carpenter surrendered in shock. He hadn’t come close to that kind of money. But by playing on his interest I had driven the other two contenders right up.
Chadwick loved Columbia, and CBS offered nearly a million but, crucially, with the recording costs and expenses having to come out of that money. Chadwick wanted to go with it. (I hadn’t let that lunatic anywhere near the hotel by the way, just reported to him at the end of the day.) But I just didn’t like CBS as much. Bates seemed to know more about America – he had Def Leppard at number one there in the singles charts.
During this time Jeff Barrett did a really fucking cheeky thing and pretended to both the NME and Melody Maker that they were getting exclusive interviews with the band in the same week. We had two front covers in the same week! Perfect timing.
It took nearly two months to finalize the deal. There was a very high late bid from EMI but in the end we went with Dave Bates at Phonogram and his Fontana label. I’d just made £80,000 personally, and we were set to make House of Love the next big British band.
The thing we didn’t predict was that the band would go completely fucking mental.
Both Chadwick and Bickers lost their minds. Kids from military backgrounds, they’re fucking nuts when they start taking drugs. I’d have that confirmed fifteen years later when I managed Pete Doherty. The drugs drove Guy mental. While we were still negotiating the deal House of Love were on a European tour and Chadwick completely lost it, ripping all his clothes off and trashing a dressing room, winding Pete Evans up till he was chasing him round a fairground trying to kill him. Jeff Barrett was there with a Sounds journalist and had to get him to hush it up.
With Terry, it was different – there was something wrong there that couldn’t withstand the madness of touring, the pressure of recording the album and justifying that massive advance. I didn’t know what to do. People from Glasgow didn’t get depression. How would you tell if they did? I just didn’t have the vocabulary to comprehend it. Or the experience. If only I’d known then what I later came to understand.
Meanwhile, we were getting very excited about putting My Bloody Valentine on record. They were living in squats in Kentish Town at that time. Pretty sordid places, I hear. I knew enough to go nowhere near them, not that I was ever invited. The band’s line-up has always been the same: Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Colm Ó Cíosóig and Debbie Googe. The first album was unbelievably easy to get off them. We did it in two sessions. Kevin Shields had two kinds of song then. The Jingle Jangle Pastels sounds I hadn’t really liked. And then he had what I called the weird stuff, the strange droney noise he was getting out of his guitar with the tremolo and some weird tuning. The only thing I ever did to A&R My Bloody Valentine was to ask Kevin for some more of the weird stuff. Red rag to a bull: he came back with loads more weird stuff! Isn’t Anything cost £7,000 to make. It was done in six weeks in 1988 and released in November of the same year. It went silver quite quickly and continued to sell steadily. Straight away the journalists loved it. We got a lot of credit for reinventing the band which we didn’t deserve – the truth was that they’d reinvented themselves. It looked like they were going to be big.
7: MANCHESTER AND ACID HOUSE
I ended 1988 in what became for me the best place in the world to take ecstasy: Manchester. I was aware of the acid house scene, going to Shoom in London a bit with Jeff Barrett, who was well into it. All sorts of characters were in there, everyone really friendly, asking how you were, what your name was, what you were on. But at Shoom I never went in the house room. House music just hadn’t clicked for me yet. It had clicked for Jeff Barrett. You should have seen the dancing he got up to there. It was like he was digging a road with a pneumatic drill. I’ve always wanted to ask him about that dance. It was the weirdest dance I’d ever seen. So, he got it, but me – I just went there to get the drugs. A lot of the time I’d head somewhere else to take them.
That night in December New Order were playing the G-Mex and there was an after-show party going on at the Hacienda. A night called Disorder. I’d been going to Manchester for a while. I loved the Happy Mondays. I loved ecstasy. The Happy Mondays had loads of ecstasy. It was a great arrangement. I got on with Shaun Ryder really well.
I was Eed up that night when I made a great mate for life, Debbie Turner, who completely randomly and cosmically is in a way responsible for my greatest ever success. But that came years later. We got talking that night when she came up to me and said, ‘Why are you wearing sunglasses inside?’
‘Because I’ve got cancer of the eye,’ I said.
She nearly broke down and went back to her mates. ‘I’m gutted. Alan’s got cancer of the eye.’
‘You soft cow,’ they said, ‘he’s taking the piss.’
She was a pretty Manchester girl, five years younger than me, and we became great buddies. We were lying around in the corner of the room when I had an epiphany.
‘Debbie,’ I said. ‘I want to marry you.’
‘You’re already married,’ she pointed out.
‘Oh, yeah. I hadn’t thought of that.’
I’d taken a lot of pills already that night but then I made the mistake of asking Shaun Ryder for another one. He only gave me a half but it was the strongest pill I ever took. That’s when Debbie’s face became a giant green diamond and I had to wander off. I was overheating, had to lie on the floor. When I got up I was walking through the basement, looking at the beams in the ceiling, green diamonds and blue tessellating shapes. It was beautiful. Tony Wilson was there, in a shining white suit, like God, or a king. I found Debbie dancing and suddenly I was dancing too and I understood what the music was about. It was something new, something incredible. It felt like it was going to change everything.
The new year started with Dave Bates rejecting the single ‘Safe’ we’d recorded and planned as the next House of Love single. He had a fixed idea of what an album that would sell millions was going to sound like and our recordings were too ‘indie’. Chadwick and I sh
ould probably never have mentioned being as big as U2 – it was all we were beginning to hear now from Dave Bates. But we’d been glad to take the money – or Chadwick and I had, anyway – so we had to send them back into the studio, this time with Tim Palmer producing. He’d just produced a single by Texas. The band were instantly in a different recording world from Creation’s.
Bickers immediately couldn’t handle it. He was a hell of a guitar player and all of a sudden he didn’t believe he was. He’d been worried about the deal from the start, about the pressure. He just wasn’t motivated about money in the way Chadwick was. He started to play up badly. He’d walk out, have screaming fits. Despite this, we got two songs done, and chose ‘Never’ as a single for the spring.
I remember going on tour with My Bloody Valentine at the start of February 1989 and Kevin Shields telling me he wanted me to be the sound engineer. We did this gig at ULU. Kevin was always sacking the soundman at this point. The Kevinitis was beginning to show itself for the first time, and it would only get worse. Professional soundmen had their own ideas, and Kevin didn’t like that. He didn’t want anyone to interfere with his vision. He knew I’d do what he told me.
I was on magic mushrooms. I’d come up from Brighton with a girl and we’d eaten handfuls on the train. I had no idea what was going on. My way of mixing the sound anyway was just to turn everything up on the desk when it got to a loud bit. It was probably perfect for a My Bloody Valentine gig. I was tripping my head off, decked out in leathers, mad red hair, sunglasses on, blasting the audience with volume – Kevin and I were loving it! He knew I was on mushrooms when he asked me to do it.
They had a section called ‘The Holocaust’ which would make the audience run for cover when they heard it. It was probably dangerous. I think he gives them earplugs these days.